Cons Truc Ting The Modern Movement: An Architectural Avant-Garde?
Cons Truc Ting The Modern Movement: An Architectural Avant-Garde?
Cons Truc Ting The Modern Movement: An Architectural Avant-Garde?
to establish,
both by argument
and by objective evidence,
that in spite of the
seeming confusion
there is nevertheless
a true, if hidden, unity,
a secret synthesis,
in our present civilization.
Sigfried Giedion, 1941
2
living conditions that are brought about by modernity lead individuals to experience
28
29
opposed to every rational ordering of things. On the contrary, they argued for a more
2
thoroughgoing rationalization that combated the irrational remnants of the tradition.11
What remains unfaded of the architecture [of the last century] is those
rare instances when construction breaks through. Construction based
entirely on provisional purposes, service and change is the only part of
building that shows an unerringly consistent development. Construc-
tion in the nineteenth century plays the role of the subconscious. Out-
wardly, construction still boasts the old pathos; underneath, concealed
behind facades, the basis of our present existence is taking shape.17
The key expression that Giedion used to describe the qualities of the new ar-
chitecture is Durchdringung (interpenetration). The almost archetypal spatial experi-
ence that gave rise to this expression was the result of the sensations aroused by
nineteenth-century girder constructions such as the Eiffel Tower18 and the Pont
Transbordeur in Marseilles, a very specific kind of bridge where a moving platform is
making the connection between the two landings (figures 3 and 4).19 Giedion’s fasci-
nation with these structures arose from the sensation of motion and from the expe-
rience of an intermingling of spaces. The description of the Eiffel Tower, for instance,
emphasizes the unique effect of a “rotating” space that is produced by climbing the
spiral flights of steps (figure 5). Exterior and interior spaces are as a result constantly
related to each other, to such an extent that in the end one cannot make any clear
distinction between the two. This new kind of spatial experience is fundamental in
the New Building:
In the air-flooded stairs of the Eiffel Tower, better yet, in the steel limbs
of a pont transbordeur, we confront the basic aesthetic experience of
today’s building: through the delicate iron net suspended in midair
stream things, ships, sea, houses, masts, landscape and harbor. They
loose their delimited form: as one descends, they circle into each other
and intermingle simultaneously.20
30
31
2
Pont Transbordeur (1905) and
harbor of Marseilles.
3
Pont Transbordeur, Marseilles. Eiffel Tower (1889),
(From Sigfried Giedion, interior of pier.
Bauen in Frankreich, fig. 61.) (From Sigfried Giedion,
Bauen in Frankreich, fig. 2.)
Giedion comments:
“Instead of a massive tower, an
open framework condensed into
minimal dimensions. The
landscape enters through
continuously changing snippets.”
4 5
Giedion’s fascination was nothing new or even out of the ordinary. The glass
and iron structures of the nineteenth century—exhibition halls, railway stations, ar-
cades, conservatories—provoked strong reactions right from the start. They were fa-
vorite subjects for modernist painters, from Manet to Delaunay (figure 6), and they
aroused fierce polemical debate, the Crystal Palace in London being a good ex-
ample.21 Neither was it the first time that the importance of these constructions de-
signed by engineers had been acknowledged in an architectural discourse where
they were seen as the prelude to a future architecture. In the work of Scheerbart and
in Sant’Elia’s and Marinetti’s futurist manifesto, however, these statements sounded
like echoes of distant unattainable visionary dreams, while Giedion succeeded in
combining the lyrical character of his homage with an extremely convincing, sober
analysis of very real and realizable buildings and spaces.
Giedion treated these fascinating spatial experiences in a very specific way,
transforming them into a description of the new architecture that at the same time
32
33
served as a guideline for future developments. In fact, he uses his descriptions of the
2
new experiences of space to constitute the foundation of the new architecture,
6
Two pages from Bauen in
Frankreich showing how Giedion
links the new experiences of
space, which he designates
with the term Durchdringung,
with the characteristics of the
New Building, here illustrated
by Mart Stam’s project for the
Amsterdam Rokin from 1926.
34
35
organized around a sequence of some two hundred figures, Moholy-Nagy inserts a
2
telling image entitled “architecture” as the culminating one (figure 10). His caption
Here Giedion links the question of the autonomy of architecture as a discipline with
the observation that spatial realities such as streets and stations no longer represent
sharply defined entities; our experience of them is essentially defined by patterns of
movement and interpenetrating elements. He suggests implicitly that architecture
no longer has anything to do with objects: if it is to survive at all it must become part
of a broader domain in which it is not so much objects as spatial relations and ratios
that are of central importance. The title of this paragraph consequentially should have
been “Architecture?” but the question mark was left out by the publisher of the
book—much to Giedion’s annoyance.28
A similar train of thought underlies the slogan “Konstruktion wird Gestaltung”
(construction becomes design) that Giedion originally had in mind as the title for his
book.29 This expression perfectly sums up his basic idea: architecture is no longer
concerned with representative facades and monumental volumes; instead, its aim is
to design new relationships based on a structural logic.
The sensitivity to the transitory aspect of modernity that we can see in Bauen
in Frankreich is still more pronounced in Giedion’s next publication. Befreites
Wohnen (1929) is a small book that gives a picture of the aims and achievements of
the New Building with the aid of photos accompanied by a commentary. Whereas
the first book is at some points hesitant to embrace full-heartedly the new spatial
“Architecture” according to sensibility,30 the second takes it up in
László Moholy-Nagy.
a more radical fashion. Here Giedion
(Concluding illustration in
opposes in an explicit manner tradi-
Moholy-Nagy’s Von Material
zu Architektur; photo: tional ideas such as attributing to the
Jan Kamman/Schiedam.) house an eternal value. Instead he ar-
gues, “The house is a value of use. It
is to be written off and amortized
within a measurable time.”31 This is
feasible, according to Giedion, when
building production is organized on
an industrial basis, so that building
costs and rents are reduced. Houses
should not look like fortresses; rather,
they should allow for a life that re-
quires plenty of light and wants
everything to be spacious and flex-
ible. Houses should be open; they
should reflect the contemporary
mentality that perceives all aspects
of life as interpenetrating: “Today we
10 need a house, that corresponds in
its entire structure to our bodily feel-
ing as it is influenced and liberated
through sports, gymnastics, and a
sensuous way of life: light, transparent, movable. Consequentially, this open house
also signifies a reflection of the contemporary mental condition: there are no longer
separate affairs, all domains interpenetrate.”32 Giedion explicitly refers in this text to
Sant’Elia, whose idea it was that a house should only last one generation. In the man-
ifesto that Sant’Elia wrote with Marinetti in 1914 it is indeed stated:
We have lost the sense of the monumental, of the heavy, of the static;
we have enriched our sensibility by a taste of the light, the practical, the
ephemeral and the swift. . . . An architecture so conceived cannot give
birth to any three-dimensional or linear habit, because the fundamen-
tal characteristics of Futurist architecture will be obsolescence and tran-
sience. Houses will last less long than we. Each generation will have to
build its own city.33
36
37
functionality, industry, experiment, Existenzminimum. All this, states Giedion, leads
2
to liberation, not only from the weight of the tradition, but also from too high rents.
Industrial landscape.
(From Sigfried Giedion,
Bauen in Frankreich, fig. 4.)
For Giedion this landscape
with its different levels of
transportation prefigures the
future development of cities,
where the interpenetration of
different domains will be evident.
11
12
of a montage-like superposition of heterogeneous elements (a petrol tank, a railway
bridge, a factory with smoking chimneys, a shed, electricity cables). “The various
traffic levels, the juxtaposition of objects determined only by necessity offer—so to
speak unconsciously and as raw material—possibilities for how our cities may later
be designed openly without the constraints of preestablished levels.”34 These illus-
trations along with Giedion’s commentary contain for me the most telling moment in
the book: the point at which there is a clear indication that architecture may well have
to merge with vulgar reality and accept juxtaposition and montage as design princi-
ples which allow for this merging. In this passage one can clearly see that the idea of
“montage”—a key concept for the avant-garde, according to Bürger35—is at work,
even if the term as such is not used explicitly.
38
39
Picasso, L’Arlésienne, Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Dessau,
2
1911–1912. 1926.
13 14
sienne by Picasso (figure 13),40 while in the commentary constant reference is made
to the qualities of transparency and simultaneity that are peculiar to both these
works. (In the case of the Bauhaus, what is involved is the creation of a simultaneity
between interior and exterior spaces and the transparency of the walls; with the
painting L’Arlésienne it is a matter of the transparency of overlapping surfaces and
the simultaneous depicting of different facets of the same object.)
The central thesis about the importance of the space-time concept in the new
architecture is developed and tested against the work of five masters of modern ar-
chitecture: Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, and Jørn
Utzon.41 Giedion regards the new concept of space as the most typical feature of the
new architecture. It was the product of a combination of an advance in the use of ma-
terials and construction technologies on the one hand and the artistic discoveries of
cubism, futurism, and similar movements on the other. These artistic developments
led to a new vision of space that was not based on perspective, that emphasized si-
multaneity (the depiction of an object from different viewpoints at the same time),
and that also stressed dynamics, focusing on the movement of objects and at-
tempting to depict it in painting.
The interplay between these factors—the constructional and the artistic—
opened the way for a new awareness of space in modern architecture. Buildings
were no longer visually rooted in the ground but seemed to float above it while their
different volumes interpenetrate each other instead of simply being juxtaposed.
These features together with a plentiful use of glass—a material that according to
the author was primarily used because of its dematerializing qualities and which had
the effect of making interior and exterior space appear to interpenetrate—led to an
“unprecedented many-sidedness,” creating the sense of a movement in space that
seems, if but for an instant, to be frozen.42 Giedion had identified this frozen move-
ment earlier in the stairwell of Gropius’s factory building at the Werkbund exhibition
in Cologne in 1914, but it was the Bauhaus in Dessau, also by Gropius and dating
from 1926, that he discussed as the example par excellence of this new concept of
space.
The new concept of space in modern architecture therefore proclaims and af-
firms time as a fourth dimension in a way that was quite unprecedented. The expe-
rience suggested by this architecture has a space-time character: it is not determined
by the static qualities of a fixed space but by an uninterrupted play of simultaneous
experiences of varying (spatial) character—experiences that, traditionally speaking,
could only be perceived one after the other. The typical features of modern architec-
ture, then, are simultaneity, dynamism, transparency, and many-sidedness; it is a
play of interpenetration and a suggestive flexibility.
In his conclusion Giedion emphasizes the importance of organic and irrational
elements in architecture, which in his view run the risk of being suppressed as a re-
sult of too great an emphasis on rationality. Architecture is faced with the task of
achieving a balance between the rational and geometric on the one hand and the or-
ganic and irrational on the other—between the domain of thought and that of feel-
ing. “The outstanding task of our period [is] to humanize—that is to reabsorb
emotionally—what has been created by the spirit. All talk about organizing and plan-
ning is in vain unless we first create again the whole man, unfractured in his meth-
ods of thinking and feeling.”43 In Space, Time and Architecture Giedion thus built up
a case for the thesis that modern architecture, as a legitimate heir to the most rele-
vant architectural trends of the past, is capable of contributing to bridging the gap be-
tween thought and feeling because it relies upon the concept of space-time, just as
the sciences and the arts do. The whole aim of Space, Time and Architecture was
thus to canonize modern architecture as a “new tradition.”
Space, Time and Architecture is not a pioneering text in the strict sense of the
word: the book does not break new ground or announce a completely new paradigm.
A number of elements of this paradigm had been around for some time already: the
moral appeal (Morris, Loos); the concept of space-time and its application in archi-
tecture (van Doesburg, Lissitzky); the relating of new materials and construction
40
41
technologies on the one hand with architectural design on the other (Le Corbusier);
2
the fact that architecture and city planning influence each other and are mutually de-
42
43
Giedion’s arguments in Space, Time and Architecture are not only based on a
2
more programmatic intent, they show pastoral tendencies as well. He specifically
We are being driven into an indivisible life process. We see life more
and more as a moving yet indivisible whole. The boundaries of individ-
ual fields blur. . . . Fields permeate and fertilize each other as they
overlap. . . . We value these fields not as hierarchically but as equally
justified emanations of the highest impulse: LIFE! To grasp life as a to-
tality, to allow no divisions, is among the most important concerns of
the age.50
In Space, Time and Architecture this rhetoric about bringing art and life together is
less explicit. But here too he argues that “the outstanding task of our period [is] to
humanize—that is to reabsorb emotionally—what has been created by the spirit.”51
The aim is integration—to make life complete once again and to rely on art and ar-
chitecture to achieve this. Once again, however, a certain shift in position can be de-
tected. In the quotation from 1928 Giedion comes very close to the avant-garde idea
that social life should be organized on the basis of art. In 1941, on the other hand, the
role of art and architecture is limited to healing the wounds inflicted upon the indi-
vidual by social developments. He no longer claims that developments in architec-
ture have any impact on society as a whole. If one calls “avant-garde” a position that
is characterized by a logic of negation and a critical attitude vis-à-vis social conditions,
it is clear that the architecture Giedion is advocating in Space, Time and Architecture
cannot be labeled as such any more.
15
44
45
First issue of Das Neue was very considerable; when one
2
Frankfurt, October 1926.
bears in mind that Loos built only a
See how all the evidence of present-day design tends toward a single
conclusion! ..... already streams from a hundred and a thousand
springs, brooks and rivulets are coming together which will go to make
up a new culture, a closed culture that will flow forward in a wide bed
like a confident river. Everywhere we come across the endeavor to root
out everything that is feeble, imitative, hypocritical and false. Every-
where we notice the purposeful struggle for a bold new design, for hon-
esty in the use of materials, and for truth.55
“Modernity” for May thus meant the creation of a new unified metropolitan culture.
A notion like this clearly implies the dominance of a programmatic concept of moder-
nity. Rationality and functionality were the qualities that were given first priority. “Ra-
tionality” in this context should be interpreted in a broad sense: what May and his
associates had in mind was a culture that anticipated a future society, rationally or-
ganized and conflict-free, made up of people with equal rights and common inter-
ests.57 This distant ideal and the concrete housing needs of Frankfurt combined to
form the basic tenets of housing policy in this city.
In this endeavor the architects of Das Neue Frankfurt gave priority to the in-
dustrialization of the construction process and the principles of Taylorism in the use
of space:58 they were apparently convinced that the “rational” character of these
technologies developed in the context of the capitalist system did not conflict with
the “rationality” of the society they had in mind—a society based on equal rights and
homogeneity. The purpose of the Frankfurt experiment fitted perfectly in the scheme
of the optimistic, pastoral ideology of Enlightenment that took the view that
“progress” was the result of an increasing rationality at all levels of life and of soci-
ety. In this scheme of things, the social aspect occupied a prominent place: it was
the deliberate aim of May and his team to ensure that the housing needs of the poor
and the underprivileged were alleviated, as one aspect of the increasing emancipa-
tion of all individuals. For this reason it fits perfectly into what Habermas describes
as “the modern project.” In any case, the aim was to harness the achievements of
avant-garde artists and developments in the field of technology for the actual (archi-
tectural) design of the daily lives of a large portion of the population.
The emancipation May and his associates had in mind was not purely a ma-
terial one; it also implied the enhancement of the culture of everyday life. The aim
was to increase people’s awareness of the positive aspects and new possibilities of
an epoch in which the results of the industrial revolution affected every part of daily
life. The new architecture would have to be consistent with the new conditions of
that life:
46
47
the stage coach to the railways, from cars to airships, from the tele-
2
graph to the radio, or from the old craftsman’s workshops to factories—
An openness to everything that is mobile and transitory is another feature of the new
form of everyday life:
Because the outside world of today affects us in the most intense and
disparate ways, our way of life is changing more rapidly than in previ-
ous times. It goes without saying that our surroundings will undergo
corresponding changes. This leads us to layouts, spaces, and buildings
of which every part can be altered, which are flexible, and which can be
combined in different fashions.60
The new culture thus should match the character of the new epoch, which
was seen as a source of new possibilities. The experiences of the First World War—
so it was thought—had convinced everyone of the urgency of bringing technological
and scientific developments under control. The postwar period was seen as an op-
portunity for a new start, offering the chance of establishing a culture that would
guide the process of modernization in a positive direction. Furthermore, it was pre-
cisely those facets of modernity that were viewed negatively in conservative cir-
cles—”lack of style” and lack of Gemütlichkeit (coziness), the rapid pace of life and
the increasing bombardment of impressions and experiences, and the break with tra-
ditional values—that were seen as stimuli for the design of this new culture. Every-
thing new was greeted with enthusiasm—speed and movement (the increasing
impact of trains, cars and airplanes), the beginnings of the democratizing of sport and
leisure activities, the relaxing of social codes coupled with increasing social mobil-
ity.61 All this was seen as the beginning of a process that would lead to a genuinely
humane society of emancipated men and women in which equal rights would go
hand in hand with a high degree of personal freedom.
A certain tendency toward asceticism was unquestionably present in the
“struggle for a bold new design, for honesty in the use of materials, and for truth”
that May announced in the first issue of his magazine. This tendency had to do with
the idea that one could get to the essence of things only by stripping away all excess
and by rejecting everything that was superfluous. A pure and sober architecture of
the utmost simplicity was the correct foundation for a contemporary culture of every-
day life. Truth should be the criterion rather than representation (figure 17). Mart
Stam states this conviction eloquently:
Correct measures are those that conform to our requirements, that ful-
fill these needs without any pretensions, that do not claim to be more
than they are. Correct measures are those that result in a minimum of
ostentation. Everything else is ballast. . . .
The struggle for modern architecture then is a struggle against
pretentiousness, against every excess and for a human scale.62
Behind this approach is the notion that every object should be understood in terms
of its inmost essence. This essence conforms to its function, to what it can be used
for. Beauty exists when people succeed in giving this essence as accurate a form as
possible, without any “excess” or anything that is extraneous or superfluous. It was
this conviction that made the project of housing for the Existenzminimum more than
a purely instrumental answer to the housing situation.63 The architects of the New
Building were not only interested in the program of housing for the underprivileged
classes for extrinsic, social reasons. They also saw it as an opportunity to realize an
ascetic ideal—housing reduced to its essence, pure, minimal, and authentic.
In the course of time, however, a slight shift of emphasis in the issues of Das
Neue Frankfurt became apparent. During the early years virtually no attempt was
made to analyze the economic and social aspects of housing policy in Frankfurt: they
were apparently regarded as self-evident aspects of the struggle to create a new cul-
ture. Gradually, however, these themes began to be treated independently of the cul-
tural context, as autonomous problems. In 1928, for instance, in the special issue
about housing, the necessity of rationality and functionality in housing design was
still defended on the grounds of a general concept of dwelling culture, while in 1929
in the issue on billige Wohnungen (cheap housing), published on the occasion of the
CIAM congress in Frankfurt, much more stress was laid on hygiene and on social and
economic arguments.64 Unquestionably, the economic crisis had forced architecture
to concentrate more on economic necessi-
ties, and this led to a more pronounced con-
Cover of Das Neue Frankfurt, sideration of building costs.65 After 1929,
January 1928. when the consequences of the economic
crisis clearly began to make themselves felt,
public housing was treated primarily as an
economic and financial problem, and ratio-
nality and functionality in design was mainly
thought of in terms of cost-effectiveness.
Even so, functionalism in Das Neue
Frankfurt continued to be seen as part of
a project for emancipation. It was the aim
of May and his associates to provide the
mass of people on the housing lists with
decent accommodation that would free
them from intolerable living conditions.
17
These new homes would allow them to en-
48
49
joy a minimum of modern comforts (figure 18) together with direct contact with na-
2
ture—all at a rent they could afford. The rationalization of the construction process
May’s arguments make it clear that a shift had occurred in the policy of Das
Neue Frankfurt. The term Existenzminimum no longer implied dwellings that re-
18
duced housing to its essentials; instead what was discussed was a choice between
two evils. It was better to have too-small homes for many people than “good”
homes for the few. This argument is yet another token of the degree to which the
Das Neue Frankfurt project was committed to a genuinely dynamic movement for
emancipation that often tended to violate the purity of ideological positions.
50
51
Aerial photograph of the
2
Siedlung of Hellerhof. The
19
20 Layout of Hellerhof.
furt. As a result a sort of dialectics developed between the modern design principles
that served as guidelines and the concrete context in which the work was carried out.
This dialectic explains the profusion of May’s achievement in Frankfurt.67
May’s planning was based on the concept of the Trabantenstadt.68 The Tra-
bantenstadt consists of a core city surrounded by a number of satellites (Trabanten),
at a certain distance from the center but with very good transport connections. To a
certain extent this concept shows the hallmarks of fragmentation and decentraliza-
tion, but it is built according to a distinct organic pattern. The city admittedly is split
into separate parts: the urban tissue does not extend in a continuum but is broken by
green areas, being fragmented as a result (figure 23). The hierarchy between the nu-
cleus of the city and the satellites is preserved, however, and the general structure
of the city is characterized by the fact that the city center also has a central function,
serving as the “nucleus” or “heart” of the city. It contains all the important civic
amenities and the main commercial, administrative, political, and economic activities
Hellerhof, plan of the houses
from 1901.
21
all take place here. This hierarchical structure with its centralizing tendency is com-
bined with distinct zoning. Without it being explicitly stated in principle at that time
(the Charter of Athens was only drawn up in 1933), the construction of the Siedlun-
gen created a de facto functional segregation. The Siedlungen, after all, consisted pri-
marily of housing.69 Consequently, a clear trend emerged of creating a geographical
separation between housing (in the Siedlungen), work (in the industrial terrains on
the banks of the Main), trade, culture, and education (in the city center), and an in-
frastructure of roads and railways that forms an essential connecting element.70
52
53
On the level of the morphology of the city we come across the symbiosis of
2
an organic design model and an approach that is based on financial and functional
24
The center of the city has the highest density of development and it is sur-
rounded by a belt of nineteenth-century developments that are supplemented and,
where necessary, completed with new Siedlungen. The Siedlung of Bornheimer
Hang, for instance, completes the eastern side of this belt. Architecturally the “out-
skirts” of this Siedlung were given details that are reminiscent of a medieval rampart:
on the ridge of the hill, the east side of which remained undeveloped otherwise, a
continuous development was built with alternately three and four stories. These first
“outskirts,” however, do not constitute the outer boundary of the city; instead they
mark the beginning of the greenbelt that is an integral part of the urban area. Where
an initial development already existed around the radial exit routes, an additional de-
velopment was provided, punctuating the greenbelt with built-up areas. Numerous
smaller projects of Das Neue Frankfurt, including, for instance, the Siedlung of Lin-
denbaum (where Walter Gropius was responsible for the architecture), form part of
this addition to a radial development. Finally, the larger Siedlungen in Westhausen,
Praunheim, and Römerstadt to the west and Riederwald to the east belong to the
outer “ring” of the city, constituting so-called Vorortstrabanten— suburbs which are
related to the city but which also exist as entities in their own right. In the spots
where this ring verges on the Main we find the industrial terrains—that of Fechen-
heim in the east and Höchst in the west. To the south of the Main the ring is broken,
making way for the Stadtswald.
All this means that the city has to be read as a whole and that the greenbelt
should be regarded as a complex of “city parks” rather than as a nonurban area situ-
ated between the nucleus of the city and the Trabanten.72 This reading goes against
the interpretation of the Siedlungen as “islands” that have nothing in common with
the existing city. From the interplay of morphology and architectural formal idiom at
every level, one can clearly see that the aim was to treat the city as a whole and to
54
55
inaugurate the new era by developing a dialectic between a new formal idiom and
2
the existing traditions of an existing city.
26
There are, however, a number of important new features: the brilliant interplay
of curved and rectangular shapes, both in the layout of the streets and in the relating
architectural elements: rounded ends for the buildings at the height of the bastions
in the western part—the part with the straight streets (figure 27); right-angled ends
for the buildings in the corresponding eastern part; rounded ends, rounded windows,
and quarter-circle transitions to overcome the differences in height in the northern
block of the Hadrianstrasse, the block that lies opposite the exits of the straight
streets; right angles and rectangular windows for the southern block that overlooks
the junctions of the curved streets and the Hadrianstrasse; the taut architectural
design; the irregular street profile (no front gardens on the southern row of houses,
while the northern ones do have them). The undulating course of the Hadrianstrasse,
which is highlighted by the curved shapes of the blocks on the inside of the
curves, makes plain its function as a traffic artery,74 suggesting an image of dynamic
movement.
All told, Römerstadt is a very successful combination of a number of earlier, or-
ganic design principles with the sensation of simultaneity and movement created by
the dynamism of a new architectural idiom.
Another successful example of the interplay between old and new morpho-
logical principles is Riedhof (1927 and the following years). The principle of Zeilen-
bau, the open row layout, was exploited here for the first time (figure 28). The open
row provided a radical alternative to the closed block of nineteenth-century architec-
ture with its rectangular construction. The closed block differentiates sharply be-
tween front and back, but in the view of the avant-garde architects the disadvantages
of this layout are striking: an unattractive orientation for part of the buildings, poor
lighting and ventilation, and awkward treatment of the corners. The idea was to over-
come the drawbacks of the closed block by opening it up and by having the rows of
56
57
houses no longer built face to face, but giving them all an identical orientation, so that
2
front and back facades look out on each other. The main argument for this Zeilenbau
28
yard, while with a second movement it creates an abrupt reduction of the space, re-
sulting in a narrowing that coincides with the junction of all the residential streets
with the Stresemannallee (the former Wilhelmstrasse) that constitutes the eastern
boundary of the housing complex. Alongside the Stresemannallee, the final wings of
the hooks form a long, high, unbroken, and straight urban elevation that gives access
at regular intervals to the residential streets.
On the west side each of the residential streets leads to the Heimatring (fig-
ure 29). These junctions also are given an architectural accent—every row is pro-
longed over the Heimatring and ends with a wing at right angles to the residential
street, forming the urban elevation of the Heimatring. These striking ends mean that
a clearly defined boundary is set up in this Siedlung between what is “inside” the
Siedlung and what is “outside.” In the Siedlung itself, however, there is no hierarchy,
and, unlike Römerstadt, it has no definite center. This is partly due to the nonhierar-
chical character of the Zeilenbau principle and partly to the lack of community facili-
ties such as those that contribute to the centralizing character of the Hadrianstrasse
in Römerstadt (shops, catering facilities, and the school).
The Zeilenbau principle was modified not only by these very definite bound-
aries but also by the subtle way that every street is given its own character. It is true
58
59
that the architecture of all the rows is very regular, but every street is given a specific
2
character by the planting of a particular sort of tree—also the source of the street
29 Riedhof, Heimatring.
Axonometric scheme of the
Siedlung of Westhausen.
30
31
core of the city. However, one can get to it from Westhausen only by crossing the
busy Ludwig Landmannstrasse. The structure of Westhausen is definitely nonhier-
archical. It has no definite center and there is only one place with a striking individual
design—the communal laundry with its tall chimney, situated in the southwest cor-
ner of the Siedlung.75
The evolution from a garden city concept to open row development occurred
largely because of growing problems with financing these housing schemes; at the
same time it also fitted in with an increasingly radical tendency toward rationaliza-
tion.76 The earlier Siedlungen, including Römerstadt and Riedhof, were distinguished
by the highly differentiated design of the urban spaces that was the result of using
divergent types of dwelling and by applying architectural accents in appropriate
places. After 1929 there is an unmistakable tendency toward great simplicity: there
60
61
Westhausen, pedestrian path
2
giving access to dwellings
32
are very few different types of dwelling in Westhausen (figures 34 and 35) and the
differentiation of the urban spaces is carried out with a much more limited range of
devices (there are no more architectural accents in the form of special corners, gate-
houses, underpasses, and so on).
Even so, many of the most distinctive features of the achievements of Das
Neue Frankfurt continue to be present in Westhausen: the neat, imaginative layout
of the public spaces (the communal strips of grass and the sequence formed by foot-
path, grass strips, and private gardens); the feeling for architectural detail (the pro-
tection against curious passersby that is provided by raising the ground-floor story,
the provision of tiny front gardens, the entrances with canopies over them); the high
standard of amenities and—considering the spatial limitations—the outstanding or-
ganization of the floor plans of the dwellings.77 The systematic seriality punctuated
by the variety in the character of public areas creates a neutrality and homogeneity
that forms the basis for the equality, freedom, and mobility of the residents. Life here
is anonymous, but space is provided for the individual needs of every resident. The
morphology of the Siedlung is based on the extreme rationalism of the Zeilenbau
principle, but this is coupled with the great care that is given to the design of the open
Blocks in Westhausen designed
by Ferdinand Kramer. View of the
north facade.
33
62
63
The result is a Siedlung in which all the elements are present that will later
2
lead to a trivializing and instrumentalizing of the functionalist principles, but still one
34
64
65
Theo van Doesburg, Space-Time
2
Construction III, 1923.
Design in the city of Frankfurt am Main will be the main object of our
study. That does not mean, however, that we will limit our circle of con-
tributors to this city. On the contrary, our aim is to make our pages avail-
able to important figures from all parts of our country and from abroad
who have similar aims in both theory and practice. They will serve as a
stimulus, supplementing what we create here.86
This explicitly stated affinity with the international avant-garde does not alter the fact
that what was at stake in Das Neue Frankfurt was quite specific. Unlike visual artists
or theater directors, this group had to deal with a sociopolitical and physical context
that limited their freedom of movement. Both the requirements and expectations of
their client—the city government—and the physical presence of the existing city of
66
67
Frankfurt were factors that could not be ignored. The parameters within which they
2
had to operate were fairly narrow.
If one juxtaposes this passage with the Futurist Manifesto of 1909, for instance, with
its appeal to destroy museums, libraries, and academies, it is clear that May’s atti-
tude was much more ambivalent than that of Marinetti. In retrospect, it is this am-
bivalence that makes the achievements of Frankfurt so exceptional. It contains a
promise of emancipation and equality transformed into an architectural language that
is light, open, and neutral. At the same time, the memory of the city was not
erased—the existing city with its historical strata is not denied or encroached on, but
serves rather as a basis for the new additions. This results in the old and new com-
plementing each other—something that would have been impossible with an avant-
garde logic adhered to at all cost.
Another feature that is lacking in Frankfurt is the radicalization of modernity as
a “culture of crisis.” The emphasis was clearly on the task of building as much as
possible within the shortest time possible. The operational concept of modernity for
May and his collaborators thus was programmatic rather than transitory. It is hard to
find any trace in Das Neue Frankfurt of what Calinescu describes as “an inbuilt ten-
dency for the avant-garde eventually to destroy itself”—unless, of course, one
would judge their somewhat naive assessment of the political conditions as such,
which I think would be rather unfair. One could state that the Frankfurt avant-garde
did in fact include a notion of “the sublation of art into the praxis of life” in its pro-
gram, in the sense that it was their deliberate intention that their experiments in the
arts and architecture would bear fruit in designing the surroundings of everyday life
and in enhancing the dwelling culture of the population. In their eyes, however, the
“transformation of art in the practice of life” did not imply any undermining of the ra-
tional organization of society—as was the intention of dadaism or surrealism. In Das
Neue Frankfurt there was no opposition toward the instrumental rationality of the so-
cial order. On the contrary, their advocating industrialization, standardization, and ra-
tionalization was entirely in keeping with a societal modernization implemented ac-
cording to the norms of an instrumental rationality.
The efforts of May and his associates were nevertheless not meant to support
a development along capitalist lines. It is clear that it was their intention to take the
rationality and functionality of the social order a stage further with the eventual aim
of transcending the existing bourgeois social order.88 Like Giedion, they were con-
vinced that architecture could play a vital role in this social renewal, because it has
the capacity to restore the broken relationship between subjective culture and ob-
jective culture.89 In their view the daily presence of an efficient and functional archi-
tecture would stimulate individuals to respond in a less alienated fashion to the
efficiency and functionality that are the hallmarks of objective culture.90
The group of Das Neue Frankfurt saw it as its task to create a new culture in
the broadest sense of the word, one that would cover all aspects of social and per-
sonal life. They never actually succeeded in fulfilling what they set out to do, because
the decisive societal changes they were preparing never did occur. This was partly
due to political and social developments which took a regressive turn and made an
end to opportunities that for a short period were actually there.
These opportunities were the result of a particular phase of development in
German capitalism. After the troubled and turbulent years immediately after the First
World War, a period of stability was inaugurated in 1923 with the Weimar Republic
pursuing social democratic policies. One aspect of this policy of stabilizing the eco-
nomic and social situation was the introduction of the Hauszinsteuer, a tax on rents
that was imposed on owners of prewar real estate; due to rising inflation this tax
yielded a sum many times the original rental. A considerable part of the revenues
from this tax was spent on public housing. Nevertheless, the unprecedented rise in
construction costs in combination with soaring interest rates meant that even before
the economic crisis of 1929, the housing program in Frankfurt had to come under re-
view. The rents on new housing that were calculated on the basis of their cost price
and on the level of interest rates had simply risen beyond the means of the working
classes to afford.91 After 1929 the flow of funds from the state for public housing was
increasingly blocked. Not surprisingly, May’s departure for the Soviet Union in the au-
tumn of 1930 coincided with the end of large-scale building operations in Frankfurt.
These circumstances have led a number of authors to interpret Das Neue
Frankfurt as a step toward imposing increasing restraints and norms on social life
rather than as an authentic contribution to the liberation of dwelling.92 Juan
Rodríguez-Lores and G. Uhlig go into some detail on this question. They make par-
ticular reference to the paradoxical relation between an originally leftist program of
reforms and the technological battery of instruments that largely originated in, and
responded to, the logic of capitalism. The result of a reformist strategy such as
May’s, they argue, was for the working class to become better integrated in bour-
geois capitalist society, even though its original intention had been to combat this
form of social organization and to reform it fundamentally. To the extent that the un-
68
69
“A homogeneous
2
metropolitan public.”
38
derlying aim of realizing a classless society was not achieved, the implicit promises
of modern architecture also turned out to be empty ones. The expectations aroused
were only fulfilled in the realm of aesthetics; at the level of praxis they remained
frustrated.93
Viewed in retrospect, this criticism is to a certain extent correct. The activists
of Das Neue Frankfurt assumed somewhat naively that transformations in the realm
of architecture would be sufficient in themselves to spark the process of a more gen-
eral reform of society. As we know now, that hope was in vain. That the project failed
to be completed, however, was not only due to the unfavorable turn of political and
economic events, but also to misjudgments and false expectations of it initiators. It
is doubtful, for instance, whether the radical ambition to design the city according to
the needs of the collective could have any real meaning in a context where the cap-
italist system of ownership was left basically untouched. Uhlig and Rodriguez concur
with Tafuri in arguing that the construction of the Siedlungen attested to a strategy
of evasion: they certainly did not solve the real problems of the city that resulted from
the increasing commercialization of the center.
Other contradictions are also inherent in the discourse of Das Neue Frankfurt.
It was assumed, for instance, that there was such a thing as a homogeneous met-
ropolitan public (or that an entity like this would emerge in the future) and that this
entity would be capable of responding in an appropriate fashion to the new architec-
ture (figure 38). This assumption in fact is not compatible with the importance at-
tached to qualities such as freedom, mobility, and transitoriness. When one aims to
promote the freedom of every individual and to create as great a potential for change
as possible, it is hardly logical to assume that all these individuals will make the same
choices and will change in the same fashion. This, however, was the expectation that
lay behind the supposedly homogeneous character of the metropolitan public.
May’s treatment of the whole culture as an entity that, as it were, ceaselessly
gives form to social reality should therefore be questioned. May’s concept does not
take into account contradictory tendencies and conflicts in interest that are inevitable
in a modern society. His pastoral ideas cannot cope with contradictions that are in-
herent to capitalist development. He was therefore not capable of formulating an ad-
equate reaction when economic imperatives became an obstacle for the realization
of his cultural program.
But in the end these critical comments do not alter the fact that something of
great importance was achieved in Frankfurt. Starting out from a pastoral and pro-
grammatic concept of modernity, a large number of interventions were actually com-
pleted that have enriched the city permanently. The unidimensionality and simplicity
that were operative at a theoretical level did not extend to the built realizations. In
fact, the confrontation between the new architecture and the existing city gave rise
to an ambivalence which contained a critical utopian moment—the promise of eman-
cipation and liberation—as well as a subtle respect for the existing city as a sediment
for people’s memories and as an indispensable substratum for the future. It is pre-
cisely for this reason that estates such as Westhausen, Römerstadt, and Riedhof
form significant contributions not only to the history of Frankfurt but to that of archi-
tecture and urbanism as a whole.
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71